Lycurgus

And indeed in matters of the couch and the daily way of life Homer seems competent to give an education truly heroic and kingly, so that Lycurgus, having learned the Laconian common meals from him, established them by law for the Spartans.

Gentlemen of the jury, as I sat here for a long time and listened with you to the speech of Lycurgus for the prosecution, I thought it in general an excellent speech;

that the writings of Lycurgus, of Solon, our Twelve Tables are not laws, nor even is it a city or a state unless it be of the wise?

[Nonius, 362M] And our Plato even more than Lycurgus, who bids absolutely all things to be common, lest any citizen be able to call any thing his own or proper to himself.

But why do I commemorate Socrates or Theramenes, men eminent in the renown of virtue and wisdom, when a certain Spartan, whose name has not even been recorded, so despised death that, when he was being led to it, condemned by the ephors, and was of cheerful and glad countenance, and a certain enemy had said to him, "Do you scorn the laws of Lycurgus?

I think Lycurgus in his speech has satisfactorily proved that the defendant is an unscrupulous man and has an extraordinary faculty for injustice;

For none of the Greeks is ignorant that during the lifetime of Lycurgus you honored him extraordinarily, and, though many charges were brought against him by those who were envious of him, you never found a single charge to be true, and you so trusted him and believed him to be truly democratic beyond all others that you decided many points of justice on the ground that Lycurgus said so, and that sufficed for you.

Among these was recorded a statement of Lycurgus, who claimed to have been told by the relatives that during the wedding of Charippus to the woman I followed and tried to persuade her to reserve herself and have nothing to do with Charippus.

For if, disdaining to take notice of the criticisms of people who are able to do nothing but find fault, I were to review one after the other not only the other achievements of our ancestors but also the ways and practices in warfare by which they prevailed over the barbarians and attained to glory among the Hellenes, inevitably some will say that I am really speaking of the ordinances which Lycur …

Or only look, she said, at the fine children whom Lycurgus left behind him in Lacedaemon to deliver his country and—I may almost say—the whole of Greece;